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Discriminating or retaliating against employees for becoming or being pregnant is against the law. Unfortunately, like so many other kinds of discrimination, it's still far too common to find in the workplace, and a Google employee says the problem is alive and well there, too.

"I'm Not Returning to Google After Maternity Leave, and Here is Why," the memo begins.

The employee writes that, after several years as a high performer with a strong track record within the company, she was promoted to manage a small team of her own about 18 months ago. "At one point after my promotion, my director/manager started making inappropriate comments about a member of my team, including that the Googler was likely pregnant again and was overly emotional and hard to work with when pregnant," she writes.

The writer's boss made clear that the writer should "manage the member of staff" out of the team. After documenting several instances of inappropriate remarks by her boss, the writer went to HR, and the manager evidently learned about it.

"I endured months of angry chats and emails, vetoed projects, her ignoring me during in-person encounters, and public shaming," the employee writes. She reported the retaliation several times to HR, but nothing improved.

The employee (who, by this point, was herself pregnant) accepted a position on another team inside the company. When she disclosed her intention to leave, the VP in charge of her section—above her problematic boss—personally asked her to stay. So she did. However, the situation with her boss did not improve, and so she again sought to transfer within the company.

Further Reading

She accepted a management role with another team more than four months before her maternity leave was expected to start. Her new boss introduced her via email as a manager, she writes, but then said she wouldn't actually be given a team to manage until after returning from maternity leave several months later.

"My new manager repeatedly stated that I was not to tackle any management tasks, and I was excluded from certain management communications and offsites," she writes. "I initially didn't complain about what was obvious discrimination" because of her demoralizing experience in her previous role. Eventually, she mentioned the retaliation and discrimination by the former boss to the new boss. The new boss "warned that I should let the situation go given the seniority level and influence" of the former manager.

Pregnancy can be fraught and difficult, and a few weeks later, the employee developed a condition that put her life and her pregnancy at risk. The condition was likely to force her to start her maternity leave early. When discussing it with her manager, however, the boss dismissed her concerns, claiming that a media report "debunked the benefits of bedrest." The boss added that she herself had ignored her own physician's recommendations to keep working when she was pregnant.

The manager "then emphasized in this same meeting that a management role was no longer guaranteed upon my return from maternity leave and that she supported my interviewing for other roles at Google."

“Poor job of communicating”

A few weeks later, the employee did indeed have to begin early maternity leave for medical reasons. She ultimately had an emergency cesarean section to deliver her baby prematurely. While she was on leave, HR finally got back to her with the results of the discrimination investigation against the first manager.

"I was told that my manager did a poor job of communicating the scope of my new role," she writes. HR additionally claimed that she was excluded from managerial functions due to "administrative error" and that the boss didn't actually mean to discourage her from taking early leave.

Motherboard said it verified the authenticity of the memo though it cannot verify the veracity of every claim. Motherboard also reports that at least 10,000 Google employees have seen the memo, which went viral on the company's internal systems. (Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., has more than 100,000 full-time employees worldwide.)

A Google representative told Motherboard in a statement, "We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy." The spokesperson also said the company investigates "all allegations of retaliation."

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A Google representative told Motherboard in a statement, "We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy." The spokesperson also said the company investigates "all allegations of retaliation."

Their corporate policy might say one thing, but if this story is to be believed, their corporate culture needs a serious reboot.

A Google representative told Motherboard in a statement, "We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy." The spokesperson also said the company investigates "all allegations of retaliation."

Their corporate policy might say one thing, but if this story is to be believed, their corporate culture needs a serious reboot.

Yeah, having a written "policy" in place is not, and should not be, a Get out of jail free card.

The employee writes that, after several years as a high performer with a strong track record within the company, she was promoted to manage a small team of her own about 18 months ago. "At one point after my promotion, my director/manager started making inappropriate comments about a member of my team, including that the Googler was likely pregnant again and was overly emotional and hard to work with when pregnant," she writes.

So obviously there's a lot more going on here than what I was expecting when I clicked on the article (which was just not wanting to promote women who are about to be out for a significant chunk of time), but you could fix a significant part of these issues by making it normal and expected for men to take paternity leave, and to make it the same amount of time as women get for maternity leave. There's nothing to discriminate about if men are just as likely to disappear for six months after having a kid.

Similar incident happened to my relative. When she came back from her maternity leave, another manager at Google stole most of her team members without letting her know. And none of the managers offered congratulatory messages, instead scolding her for not working late.

A Google representative told Motherboard in a statement, "We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy." The spokesperson also said the company investigates "all allegations of retaliation."

Their corporate policy might say one thing, but if this story is to be believed, their corporate culture needs a serious reboot.

In a company with 100,000 people, like Google, there will always be unhappy employees, and there will always be bad bosses, and bosses doing things they shouldn't. It isn't really a newsworthy event nor does a single employee's experience display a crisis of culture. I agree this seems like she was treated badly, but if we replace 'Google' with 'Catepillar' or 'JC Penney' or 'Pfizer', which have about the same number of employees this wouldn't even be reported on.

The employee writes that, after several years as a high performer with a strong track record within the company, she was promoted to manage a small team of her own about 18 months ago. "At one point after my promotion, my director/manager started making inappropriate comments about a member of my team, including that the Googler was likely pregnant again and was overly emotional and hard to work with when pregnant," she writes.

So obviously there's a lot more going on here than what I was expecting when I clicked on the article (which was just not wanting to promote women who are about to be out for a significant chunk of time), you could fix a significant part of these issues by making it normal and expected for men to take paternity leave. There's nothing to discriminate about if men are just as likely to disappear for six months after having a kid.

Six months? You must be posting from Europe.

We get three here in the US, to be taken any time within the first twelve months of birth.*

The corporate culture at most of the big firms in the Valley is brutal and unforgiving. It's still not nearly as bad as Wall Street, but it's bad. Google, if anecdotes from HN and other forums are to be believed, has a culture that is hyper-focused on advancement and team-hopping, even to the detriment of products. (as we all can see from the graveyard of canceled Google apps and services)

This kind of story is a direct result of that culture. On Wall Street one might expect that there be some sexism at the root of it, but notice in this story that most of the bosses were female. The company can't stop, won't stop.

One problem is that at Google, one cannot talk openly about the interaction of maternity leave and productivity. If you're not allowed to acknowledge that the company has to work around a problem (loss of team members for months at a time), then how are they ever going to solve the inevitable bias that develops from bosses that are hyper-focused on the bottom line?

The failure comes from the very top of the leadership structure. They should be driving the initiatives that allows for elasticity in expectations when mothers go on leave. They should be calculating the loss into their math when conducting performance reviews on management. They should be signalling that mothers are valued.

In a company with 100,000 people, like Google, there will always be unhappy employees, and there will always be bad bosses, and bosses doing things they shouldn't. It isn't really a newsworthy event nor does a single employee's experience display a crisis of culture. I agree this seems like she was treated badly, but if we replace 'Google' with 'Catepillar' or 'JC Penney' or 'Pfizer', which have about the same number of employees this wouldn't even be reported on.

So, what would it take for you to believe that there was a "crisis of culture"?

Nonsense like this seems almost inevitable in a company which practically has a fetish for perceived dedication to the job, where the dedicated Googler (red flag right there!) should eat and recreate and do laundry and nap and work weekends on campus.

Seems like you'd have to take a blowtorch to the whole corporate culture, which probably ought to happen anyway.

The employee writes that, after several years as a high performer with a strong track record within the company, she was promoted to manage a small team of her own about 18 months ago. "At one point after my promotion, my director/manager started making inappropriate comments about a member of my team, including that the Googler was likely pregnant again and was overly emotional and hard to work with when pregnant," she writes.

So obviously there's a lot more going on here than what I was expecting when I clicked on the article (which was just not wanting to promote women who are about to be out for a significant chunk of time), but you could fix a significant part of these issues by making it normal and expected for men to take paternity leave. There's nothing to discriminate about if men are just as likely to disappear for six months after having a kid.

It’s more than just a male/female thing though. Reread the article and it mentions that the bosses in question were also female. There’s some seriously fucked up work expectations for everyone and seemingly by everyone in that company.

In a company with 100,000 people, like Google, there will always be unhappy employees, and there will always be bad bosses, and bosses doing things they shouldn't. It isn't really a newsworthy event nor does a single employee's experience display a crisis of culture. I agree this seems like she was treated badly, but if we replace 'Google' with 'Catepillar' or 'JC Penney' or 'Pfizer', which have about the same number of employees this wouldn't even be reported on.

It should still be reported on even at those other companies by other news agencies, but Ars wouldn't necessarily cover it because those aren't normally in Ars' typical ranges (Pfizer would be though).

Not entirely surprising. If the free market/maximum shareholder profits corporate spirit got its way, they would probably find a way to make us all work 80 hour weeks and never take vacations. From a value to the company perspective, maternity and paternity leave is just about the worst thing you can do.

This is why labor laws exist -- to protect us from the excesses of corporate sociopathy.

In a company with 100,000 people, like Google, there will always be unhappy employees, and there will always be bad bosses, and bosses doing things they shouldn't. It isn't really a newsworthy event nor does a single employee's experience display a crisis of culture. I agree this seems like she was treated badly, but if we replace 'Google' with 'Catepillar' or 'JC Penney' or 'Pfizer', which have about the same number of employees this wouldn't even be reported on.

Oh how I want to shame my former employer (especially their golden boy who did it) publicly for similar behavior.But I’m not a fan of having to go to court and paying money and having my life further ruined for other people’s bad behavior, so I’ll sit here and suffer in relative silence like so many of you likely have.

If any software engineers wonder why some of us are warning that sexism is one of the reasons why women aren't as represented in technology, this is a good example. Only women can get pregnant. Maternity leave is a challenge for businesses to plan around sometimes. The end result is an explicit bias against hiring young women, or an unconscious bias during the hiring process. I would have thought Google would do a better job of this, I am disappointed. Luckily my company just started offering 6 months paid parental leave for either sex. That's one way of breaking the internal calculus not to hire young women that may start a family soon. Your young men want to spend time with the baby too, and now hiring that young man instead isn't a net (illegal) benefit.

HR doesn’t care about fairness or justice. Their goal is to make the problem go away at minimal cost to the company.

A caveat: a good HR department recognizes that there exist both short-term costs and long-term costs, and they will seek to minimize some sensible combination of the two. In this case, it looks a lot like Google successfully minimized the short-term costs but again finds itself facing long-term reputational damage.

(Let me know when/if you actually find a good HR department! I want to go to there.)

I’ve been through this type of nasty stuff from fellow employees and managers in my 40 years of employment at various places, and I’ve never been pregnant. I’m a single white male. Imagine that.

One place was bad enough I had to leave in the middle of the day and file for bankruptcy months later.

Discrimination and hostile environments exists at lots of places for lots of different reasons. There’s no excuse for it. Life’s too short to deal with it sometimes. But, at some point you have to learn to put up with it and count your blessings or move on. I’ve done both.

She accepted a management role with another team more than four months before her maternity leave was expected to start. Her new boss introduced her via email as a manager, she writes, but then said she wouldn't actually be given a team to manage until after returning from maternity leave several months later.

While it sucks for her, it makes sense not to start a new management role with only a few months to go before giving birth; having a revolving door of managers can be quite distuptive to the team, so better to find something else to do for a few months. And yes, I would say the same for a man about to be a father and go on paternity leave, I have two male colleges on leave atm, one have been gone for almost 3 months now, and they both made sure to not take on any new big projects they couldn't close out or handover before leaving. Also, it must be a lot less stressful to be on leave without a bunch of people contacting you with "just this one thing that can't wait till you are back".

The next part, however:

Quote:

Eventually, she mentioned the retaliation and discrimination by the former boss to the new boss. The new boss "warned that I should let the situation go given the seniority level and influence" of the former manager.

Pregnancy can be fraught and difficult, and a few weeks later, the employee developed a condition that put her life and her pregnancy at risk. The condition was likely to force her to start her maternity leave early. When discussing it with her manager, however, the boss dismissed her concerns, claiming that a media report "debunked the benefits of bedrest." The boss added that she herself had ignored her own physician's recommendations to keep working when she was pregnant.

The manager "then emphasized in this same meeting that a management role was no longer guaranteed upon my return from maternity leave and that she supported my interviewing for other roles at Google."

In Utah you can fire someone for "no reason". Which is perfect pretext to fire someone for an unconstitutional reason.

Right to work states are serious crap.

You can fire for "no" reason but you can't fire for a "protected" reason.... Proving the firing was for a "protected" reason is just about as hard in either case. Managers can and do lie. And employees can and do misattribute reasoning.... Rarely do you see someone fired say it was their own fault....

HR doesn’t care about fairness or justice. Their goal is to make the problem go away at minimal cost to the company.

A caveat: a good HR department recognizes that there exist both short-term costs and long-term costs, and they will seek to minimize some sensible combination of the two. In this case, it looks a lot like Google successfully minimized the short-term costs but again finds itself facing long-term reputational damage.

(Let me know when/if you actually find a good HR department! I want to go to there.)

The problem, at its core, is that HR is still accountable to those above them. Ultimately, that is the board of directors.Guess what most boards of directors have as their sole concern?You got it - short term newsworthy bits for the market to lap up. “Fuck the future. The people in it are chumps. I got mine right now.”

Edit: fixed a typo and put air quotes over the last bit since people seem to be misinterpreting this somehow

In Utah you can fire someone for "no reason". Which is perfect pretext to fire someone for an unconstitutional reason.

Right to work states are serious crap.

That's not right to work, that's at will employment. And the overwhelming majority of states, left and right, are "at will" employment states. Right to work has to do with mandatory union memberships, and has absolutely nothing to do with reasons for termination.

The problem, at its core, is that HR is still accountable to those above them. Ultimately, that is the board of directors.Guess what most boards of directors have as their sole concern?You got it - short term newsworthy bits for the market to lap up. Fuck the future. The people on it are chumps. I got mine right now.

The employee writes that, after several years as a high performer with a strong track record within the company, she was promoted to manage a small team of her own about 18 months ago. "At one point after my promotion, my director/manager started making inappropriate comments about a member of my team, including that the Googler was likely pregnant again and was overly emotional and hard to work with when pregnant," she writes.

So obviously there's a lot more going on here than what I was expecting when I clicked on the article (which was just not wanting to promote women who are about to be out for a significant chunk of time), you could fix a significant part of these issues by making it normal and expected for men to take paternity leave. There's nothing to discriminate about if men are just as likely to disappear for six months after having a kid.

Six months? You must be posting from Europe.

We get three here in the US, to be taken any time within the first twelve months of birth.

I am in the US and my company does 6 months for Mothers and 3 for Fathers.

The employee writes that, after several years as a high performer with a strong track record within the company, she was promoted to manage a small team of her own about 18 months ago. "At one point after my promotion, my director/manager started making inappropriate comments about a member of my team, including that the Googler was likely pregnant again and was overly emotional and hard to work with when pregnant," she writes.

So obviously there's a lot more going on here than what I was expecting when I clicked on the article (which was just not wanting to promote women who are about to be out for a significant chunk of time), but you could fix a significant part of these issues by making it normal and expected for men to take paternity leave, and to make it the same amount of time as women get for maternity leave. There's nothing to discriminate about if men are just as likely to disappear for six months after having a kid.

That's completely untrue. Many instances of discrimination here weren't because the employee was a woman, they resulted from the employee being pregnant. If fathers are also taking leave, they can be retaliated against just as easily for taking said leave. While paternity leave is important and should be encouraged, it isn't going to solve the problems outlined here.

A Google representative told Motherboard in a statement, "We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy." The spokesperson also said the company investigates "all allegations of retaliation."

Their corporate policy might say one thing, but if this story is to be believed, their corporate culture needs a serious reboot.

This is what happens when the vast majority of the industry is nothing but guys. A woman was pregnant at my workplace, and there was subtle jabs about her, her weight, and work ethic. (Sometimes comboing it into "pulling her weight" with the emphasis on the weight. To the point that I made an anonymous call to HR as this was pissing me off, and it was obviously embarrassing her and frustrating her. It is as if these assclowns weren't paying attention to the harassment training we need to take every damn year.But if there were more women in the tech industry I'm pretty sure some of this, not all but some, would go away. Diversity breeds forced understanding and empathy over time as you get to know you coworkers.

One of the most discouraging things from the article was that the memo writer's bosses were also women and at least one of them had also been pregnant.

So just getting more women in high positions (or minorities in government) won't automatically fix societal injustice.

That's because women in positions of authority don't change the underlying incentives. A woman of childbearing age is more likely than a man to need to stop working to bear a child, and is less likely to decide to return to work after having a child. This has real costs for companies, which is why more subtle forms of discrimination like this have persisted. The incentives simply haven't changed

One of the most discouraging things from the article was that the memo writer's bosses were also women and at least one of them had also been pregnant.

So just getting more women in high positions (or minorities in government) won't automatically fix societal injustice.

It's actually sexist to just assume it will.

And the thing is, if the culture no longer assumes that pregnancy is the woman's "duty", and embraces child-free careers as a positive thing, then pregnancy is naturally seen as more of a choice - possibly with less compassion towards pregnant workers, especially in cutthroat careers.

Charlie Ayers: Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.

Heather Cairns: And we didn’t have locks, so you can’t help it if you walk in on people if there’s no lock. Remember, we’re a bunch of twentysomethings except for me—ancient at 35, so there’s some hormones and they’re raging.

Charlie Ayers: H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.

Heather Cairns: Oh my God: This is a sexual harassment claim waiting to happen! That was my concern.